4-11-03
It takes this division a while to get unpacked
04/11/03
BRIAN MEEHAN
CAMP NEW JERSEY, Kuwait -- After months of waiting and false starts, the 4th Infantry Division is racing to unload its gear from more than 30 ships and reconnect soldiers to vehicles and weapons systems.
The Pentagon wants to get the heavily mechanized, technologically advanced division into the fight as quickly as possible.
But the logistics of moving an entire mechanized division 7,000 miles are daunting. It is equivalent to moving a town the size of West Linn, but with M1A1 Abrams tanks instead of GMC Suburbans.
The Army calls it the integration of soldiers and machines, but it looks like a giant air-raid drill. The port at Kuwait City throbs with a controlled chaos. Equipment is parked everywhere. One lot jammed with tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles measures a mile long, a half-mile wide.
Soldiers who have been streaming in at a rate of 1,000 a day are spread out in a half-dozen camps in the northern Kuwaiti desert.
The list of gear illustrates the challenge. It includes hundreds of tanks and Bradleys, Humvees, trucks, bulldozers, attack helicopters, the enormous tractor-trailer rigs used to haul Abrams tanks, supply trucks and fuel tankers vital to forward movement and soldiers, more than 25,000 of them.
"We're not quite halfway done with unloading," Maj. Myron Reineke said this week. There is talk that the first elements of the division might be ready to move north into Iraq within days. More than 16,000 out of 27,000 soldiers in Taskforce Ironhorse are already in Kuwait.
This infusion of troops and combat power will give U.S. commanders options in rooting out the rest of the Iraqi resistance or in establishing order and making the humanitarian aid flow.
"It will not be too long," Maj. Troy Smith said. "It is a huge task. This is a task that usually takes weeks, even months, and we are doing it in days."
Back at Camp New Jersey, it is the job of planners such as Reineke and Smith to link the soldiers with equipment. Weapon systems and engines must be checked; tanks and Bradleys must be fired and prepared for battle.
"I was surprised we could get everything moved out so fast," said Sgt. 1st Class Dennis Hutchens, 38, who grew up in Portland. "It is very hectic, lots of moving pieces."
Hutchens, a 1982 Benson High School graduate, is part of a group called upon to drive vehicles from the dock to the desert camps. His trip Monday was marked by sandstorms, overcast skies and 110-degree heat.
Soldiers such as Hutchens have been riding an emotional seesaw since January, when the 4th Infantry first received deployment orders. The division was eager to apply its digital communication systems and potent firepower in a northern front.
But Turkey refused access, and the division began a waiting game. Finally last month, U.S. commanders ordered Taskforce Ironhorse to deploy through Kuwait.
The division moved its gear, floating on more than 30 ships off Turkey, through the Suez Canal and around the Arabian peninsula to Kuwait City.
"Everybody is still pretty pumped up," Hutchens said. "We train to go to war. This is our job."